The 'Speed' Fix ( Thailand's drug problem is Burma )

Far Eastern Economic Review ( September 26 Issue )

HERE'S AN IDEA THAT deserves to be shot down as quickly as it's raised. Thai officials recently mooted a proposal for the government to go into the business of making cheap, fake methamphetamine pills. The fakes would be designed to cause headaches and nausea, prompting addicts to stop using the drug, known in Thailand as ya ba. Such schemes miss the real issue of Thailand's drug problem.

First, fake pills won't ease the addiction rate. Instead, they would let dealers charge as much of a premium as the market will bear for the real stuff. Rightly, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra quickly ended any consideration of the imposter-drug plan. But for what it's worth, that proposal was comparatively more credible than one by a senior member of parliament: for the government to sell the methamphetamine pills it seizes to fund state spending. (We couldn't figure out how that would lower the addiction rate.)

The point is that drug use in Thailand has become so rampant that Thais are willing to consider just about anything. Out of the country's 62-million population, a recent survey suggests that there are 2.7 million drug addicts, 2.4 million of whom are hooked on methamphetamines.

Understandably, officials are worried. For if Thailand once was only a transit point for heroin to the West, it has now become a final destination for the popular methamphetamines.

The reason for this does not only belong to Thailand: increased demand was created by supply, thanks, it is believed, to elements in Burma's military. Instead of trying to smuggle more-expensive heroin into the West through multiple layers of anti-narcotics police, drug lords figured out that it's easier to traffic--with protection from some in Burma's military--large volumes of cheap drugs for sale in a nearby market.

So long as supply floods Thailand, there is little prospect of reducing addiction. Rather than think up hare-brained schemes on the demand side, the real question is how to prudently deal with a military next door with elements that aid drug lords.

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